Delicate Things
by ncfan
Summary: Maglor becomes acquainted with the frailties of partly human children, and why you should be keeping a closer eye on your belongings when you're an immortal Elf.


This is the third installment in my series of oneshots and short stories, _The Care and Feeding of Partly Human Children. _

I own nothing.

* * *

It started so quietly, or so it seemed later to Maglor. The weather was warming and the twins wanted to play outside in the courtyard. Well, that was fine, Maglor said, so long as they came back in when the soldiers were at their drills so they would not bother them. So they would entertain themselves in the courtyard; Elrond and especially Elros enjoyed climbing up the sole tree in the town of Amon Ereb, an oak tree planted for shade in the courtyard of the fortress.

While they played, any of the soldiers who were present would sit in the thresholds of the barracks and watch, a mixture of pleasure and wistfulness on their faces. It had been so long, entirely too long, since any of these neri and nissi had seen an Elven child that they were not being called upon to kill or found to already be dead. In these times when a soldier was wed they left their lord's service, trying to seek a safer life elsewhere with their spouse. The sight of Elven children in their midst was such a rarity that it seemed that all they could do when the twins were playing in the courtyard was stand and watch, call encouragement to Elros as he climbed ever higher in the oak tree or urge the two of them on when they'd chase each other across the flagstones.

This morning, Baranel frowned when she looked at Elros, getting up from her sitting place on the stones to look the unnaturally red-faced child over more closely. She pressed her hand against his cheek, and found it hot to the touch.

Maglor noticed it at dinner, how sluggish his little charge seemed in comparison to the other, noticed his reddened face, and frankly noticed even more how little enthusiasm Elros showed for his meal. Normally the child wolfed it down without a second thought, but today he picked at his food with his fork, hunched over in his chair. When the meal was over, Maglor leaned over and pressed his hand against Elros's cheek the way Baranel had done, and winced at the heat he felt.

"It's a fever," Maeloth the healer diagnosed, and proceeded to leave the room to retrieve some sort of herbal brew that she'd mentioned would help with the fever, brisk and unconcerned.

Frankly, everyone in this room seemed to be perfectly unconcerned, and Maglor could not fathom why. Elros, lying in bed and sniffling, who was the one about to be dosed with some sort of potion. Elrond, sitting on the bed on his brother's other side, fiddling with a seam on the bed sheets. Maedhros, whom Maglor had dragged along with him out of his study and into the children's shared bedchamber because he really didn't know how he felt about facing this by himself.

Maglor himself was pacing up and down the length of the bedchamber, staring downwards, wondering with increasing anxiety exactly what was going on.

Yes, he'd had dealings with the Edain in the past, but Maglor had never really paid close attention to the physical bodies and physical health of the Edain he worked with. He wasn't sure how often they became ill, though he did know that they could die from even the most trivial of ailments. Elros had human blood; could this be it?

_But Elros is an _Elven _child, _Maglor told himself over and over again. _He has aged as an Elven child ages—which is to say slowly—he has Elven ears. He is an Elven child. Elven children don't get sick. They don't get sick. What is going on? Will he be alright? Why has he grown ill? Why?_

"Stop pacing," Maedhros told him, looked rather out of place in a sturdy chair that was nonetheless made for someone significantly smaller than him. He was looking at his brother with a faintly irritated look on his face—irritated probably that Maglor had drawn him away from what work he still had, in these days when they were reduced down to an all-but-empty fortress town and had precious little else. Well, they _did _have something else, and that something was starting to seem increasingly precious despite every last drop of reason in Maglor's mind telling him that he should not, and that was perhaps the reason he was so beside himself—now that he noticed that he was beside himself.

And perhaps it was why he was now glaring at his brother. "Why, exactly?"

"Elros is sick." Now it was Elrond who piped up, and Maglor's eyes snapped to his face. Elrond sat on the edge of the bed, looking up at him without any particular fear or worry on his face, just bemusement. "We get sick. Not a lot, but we do. We always get better in the end, though," he said to him, not to reassure him so much as simply to state a fact. But Elrond smiled faintly at him, and Maglor smiled equally faintly back.

Alright, he'd stop worrying if that was what everyone wanted. Maglor put his hand on the windowsill and drew a deep breath. The children had human blood, even if he was accustomed to thinking of them as Elven. It would not be easy, he realized, given that even now his heart was still skipping a beat from time to time at the thought of something so alien to him as 'falling ill' happening to either Elros or Elrond. It just seemed so strange to him.

Maglor became aware of eyes on him, and he looked to see Maedhros contemplating him, brow furrowed, mouth set in an ambivalent line that did not seem to know whether to smile or frown. It probably would have been a frown, Maglor decided, considering just how rare smiles were out of Maedhros these days. Maglor smiled weakly at him, and said to his brother in Quenya, "I suppose we'll just have to keep in mind from now on that the children are a bit more delicate than what we're used to dealing with."

"We're not delicate!"

And now Maglor found that it was once again his turn to be thrown by some development concerning the twins.

Maedhros too was surprised, but he recovered more quickly from the shock than Maglor did. He looked sharply to Elros, who had spoken, and neither did he spare Elrond, who had been silent, from that sharp glance. "You two speak Quenya?" he asked carefully, narrowing his eyes.

Elros nodded, rubbing at his nose and not meeting Maedhros's gaze, his tone growing significantly shyer than it had been. "Mama and our people speak Sindarin, but Papa's from Gondolin, and a lot of the people in Sirion are from there too. They speak Quenya, and so do we—even if we can't read it yet." The pointed note in his voice at that reminded Maglor of his promise to teach the twins to read, and he restrained a wince.

Satisfied, Maedhros turned his attention back to his younger brother. "And _I _suppose that care will have to be taken when speaking in front of them from now on," he remarked dryly.

"I suppose."

At that point, Maeloth came back into the room with her potion, and the only thing Maglor had to worry about was getting Elros to take an admittedly foul-smelling and probably also foul-tasting concoction to ease his fever.

-0-0-0-

An hour or so later, Maedhros had been let alone to continue the all-important and entirely brain-numbing task of managing the accounts when Maglor again intruded upon his concentration in the study. Telling himself that today was _not _the day when he needed to lose his temper and give Maglor a good knock on the head (or something else roughly comparable), Maedhros looked up, as calmly as he could, and asked, "What is it this time, Makalaurë?"

Maglor had a rather… troubled look on his face, and Maedhros prayed that it didn't have anything to do with either of Elwing's twins. Much as he'd hoped it would not come to pass, Maglor had grown so irrevocably attached to the pair of them that even if Eru himself came knocking on the doors of Amon Ereb, asking Maglor to turn them over to him, Maglor probably would have refused to part with the two of them unless he was sure that Elrond and Elros would eventually be returned to their parents. At least Elwing's twins, even Elrond, who had stayed remote longer than his brother, had warmed to Maglor and now seemed comfortable in his presence, so Maglor wasn't behaving wistfully and looking doleful every time he dealt with them.

But then again, the fact that the twins had warmed to Maglor might or might not have made the situation even worse—it would just hurt Maglor even more when Eärendil inevitably came back looking for them, and Maglor was forced to give them up.

So Maedhros prayed that whatever it was that had Maglor looking worried, it hadn't anything to do with Elros or Elrond. Frankly, he'd rather deal with the forces of Angband knocking down their door than with that.

"I'd decided I would find my harp and play something to help Elros sleep—" this piqued Maedhros's interest; if it had only been very recently that Maglor had started singing again after a long absence of song, he still hadn't returned to the harp "—and, well…" That troubled expression on Maglor's face only deepened when he produced his harp, and showed it to Maedhros.

A glint of silver caught in the sunlight, and Maedhros recognized that harp well. It was the silver harp Fëanor had wrought and given to his second son when he'd come of age. For all that Fëanor would have rather all of his sons followed him in smith-work, he respected the fact that passion took the passionate where it would and that Maglor's love lied in music, not smith-work. It had taken Fëanor nearly a year of constant effort to fashion a harp that met his exacting standards. He'd never made one before, so when he got it in his head that this was what he wished Maglor to have, he'd done what he did best—learned, and persevered. Maedhros and his mother had been both enlisted to aid him in this venture and keep it secret from Maglor, and Maedhros nearly smiled as he remembered his father cursing, cursing under his breath as he tried and failed to string the harp correctly, again and again. Fëanor had beamed to see the obvious pleasure with which his gift was received, content that what he had labored so long to perfect was well-received.

Maglor had had another harp, one made of alder wood that he had played as a child, but it had been lost when the Gap burned, and Maedhros seemed to recall that Maglor had come to much prefer the harp his father had wrought and given to him, not for its beauty, but because of how it had come to be and come to be in his possession. He would run his fingers lovingly over the taut silk strings, checking each one to make sure it was still in tune, checking to see that their melody was just as it had been when he last played it…

And that was it. The harp strings were gone.

"I think they've rotted," Maglor said unnecessarily, for wasn't that obviously what they'd done?

Maedhros shook his head, dipping his pen in the inkwell beside him. It would have been funny, to see Maglor staring down, bewildered, at his harp and its long-gone strings, if it did not strike him that the only reason this was happening was because Maglor had laid down his once-beloved harp, laid it down and left his music for so long that he didn't notice when the strings of his harp began to rot and fade away. "You should re-string it, then," was all Maedhros could say in answer, very quietly, before turning his gaze back downwards towards the accounts.

"I suppose I should."

Maglor's footsteps started to grow more distant, but before he could leave the room, Maedhros looked back up and called, "Kano?"

Pale gray eyes flicked to his face; Maglor held his harp close to his chest as he had done as a very young nér, back when he still held things up as shields against the world. "I… It would be good," Maedhros told him, wishing he could find another way to say it, but finding none, "to hear you play again."

For a moment, Maglor just stared at him, as though unsure of what to make of this. But then, he smiled, faint and melancholy, and left.

* * *

Neri—men (singular: nér)  
Nissi—women (singular: nís)  
Edain—Men (plural: Adan) (Sindarin); referring specifically to the Three Houses of the Edain


End file.
